Release Notes - January 5, 2012

System

General:

• New Ground Skills!
  • Blog post here: http://www.startrekonline.com/node/2744
  • All players must re-spend their skillpoints!
  • There are much fewer Ground Skills than before, and they follow a scheme similar to the new space skills.
    • Some skills are common to all careers, while some are career-specific.
    • Each career-specific ground skill unlocks a bridge officer training ability at Ranks 3 and 6 of the skill.
    • Some ground skills improve Shields and Armor.
      • The base values of Shields and Armor were not reduced, so these skills just make them better.
  • Any players that had the previous max skillpoint value will be automatically adjusted to the new maximum.
• Space and ground skills have been separated!
  • It's possible to spend all your skillpoints without maxing out either space or ground.
    • This is intended, as you are allowed a small amount of leeway to spend your points.
• The level range has been adjusted from 0 to 50.
  • More information here in this blog post: http://www.startrekonline.com/node/2745
  • Players will rank up at levels 10, 20, 30, 40, 45, and 50 instead of 11, 21, 31, 41, 46, and 51.
• Security officers on the power distribution of Drozana station and Captain Reaver should no longer attack KDF characters during the mission "Everything Old is New."
• Skill Point, Bridge Officer Point and CXP rewards from duty officer assignments have been adjusted.
• Duplicate bridge officers should no longer be appearing on player bridges.
• Killing NPCs in Foundry missions no longer causes players to stop receiving kill credit on all maps.
• Guild bank updates:
  • Stacks of items are no longer counting as a single item when being withdrawn from the guild bank.
  • Deposit and Withdraw log messages are now correct.
  • Credits can now be withdrawn from the guild bank when the money deposit permission is off.
• It's possible once again to access Q's Winter Wonderland event information from the calendar.
• The galaxy map should no longer open and be zoomed in so closely.
• The team leader icon on the compass no longer uses a placeholder.

Duty Officers:

• Renown assignments now appear after Establish Military Base assignments.
• Surgical Alteration assignment rewards were brought up to be in line with other long duration rewards.
• Adjusted the assignment outcome chance rigging to work with new math and adjusted the rewards for Colonial Negotiate Claim assignments.
• The Hazard Systems Officer active roster power is now working with Brace for Impact as described.
• The Maintenance active roster power is now working properly.
• Addressed bad slotting requirements on Bribe Local Governor assignments.
• Addressed bad department designations for several super-rare duty officers.
• Made minor text updates for some assignments.
• Neutralize Interference colonial assignments were re-rigged and shortened.
• Increased critical assignment Dilithium rewards.
• Increased CXP rewards for all assignments.
• Updated rewards for critical outcomes for some colonial assignments.

Systems:

• Transphasic Bomb damage was improved.
• The duration and recharge time of Engineering Ground Reroute Power to Shields was increased.
• Added Electrical Damage to Fuse Armor.
• Tuned Hyperonic Radiation so the Duration now scales over Versions I, II, and III.
  • Version I duration was reduced and Version III duration was increased.
• Scaled Tachyon Harmonic knockback across versions I, II, and III.
• Improved Subsystem repair skill so it’s less dependent on your percent of alive crew.
• Changed Energy Siphon so if it is resisted, the target resists the magnitude of the effect, and not the duration.
• Improved the effective resistance of Inertial Dampeners, Starship Sensors, and Power Insulators.
• The bonus you get from Space Hull Plating and Space Armor Reinforcements skills has been increased.
• Power Insulators now properly grant resistance to power drain.

UI:

• Players set to anonymous are no longer able to receive friend requests and fleet invites.
• When sharing missions, the "X already has this mission" message won’t show for the player that originally had the mission.
• Qo'nos First City loading screen now properly displays its map snapshot.
• The UI has now been updated to display "Rank Level" instead of "Rank Grade" (e.g. Commander 22 instead of Commander 3).
  • Note: Level numbers now display as one less than before.
• Changed the names of ranks on skill tree to be full ranks instead of abbreviations.
• Resolved scaling and blurriness issues with unique duty officer portraits.
• Updated the Foundry slot purchase tooltip to indicate Refined Dilithium is required.
• Removed old, now incorrect information from the character slot purchase tooltip.
• It is once again possible to rename your ships in the status window.
• The skill window will now display how many points have been spent in each tier, and the points required to unlock the next tier.
• Chat Channel Admin: the rows for Member info and Member Status are now correctly aligned with the other columns.
• The skills window filter list is now working as intended.
• The team leader icon on the compass no longer uses a placeholder.

Graphics:

• Blog post here: http://www.startrekonline.com/node/2745
• This release contains DirectX 11 support.
  • This new rendering API can drive video cards supporting DirectX 10 and higher: 10.1, 11, 11.1.
  • The initial release is essentially a port of our DirectX 9 rendering features to DirectX 11.
  • The game should mostly look the same, as we have not added a lot of support for newer DirectX 11 features, we’re just getting a base from which we will continue adding such features.
• We have not ported all low-end video settings support, just mid-level and high-end features.
  • Therefore, under the DirectX 11 rendering option, there may be some graphics problems with Video Options slider set all the way to Minimum.
  • Also, on hardware that only supports DirectX 10, like Nvidia GeForce 8800s and 9800s, when Antialiasing is enabled we do not currently support many depth-dependent Video effects.
    • This includes High-quality shadow mode, depth-of-field, and some others.
    • This is because Nvidia and ATI have not provided us a special driver back door we have available under DirectX 9.
• Resolved an issue with alt-tabbing while in fullscreen mode.
• Improved support for multiple monitors.

Known Issues:

• Some graphics settings can cause shadows to look ‘blocky’.
• There may be other graphical glitches here and there. Please use the /bug command to report them.